Workforce Engagement Management

I have so many clients that insist that they need to have a work plan for every agent out there. My reply is that by doing so, you are leaving very little for WFM to do. Sure you can keep track of adherence or compliance, but as far as forecasting and scheduling what do you expect the WFM to do when you are dictating schedules. Have any of you run into this or are you doing this with your contact center? What is the justification for this and how should we approach our clients with an answer to help WFM work for them instead of them working against it?  

I have so many clients that insist that they need to have a work plan for every agent out there. My reply is that by doing so, you are leaving very little for WFM to do. Sure you can keep track of adherence or compliance, but as far as forecasting and scheduling what do you expect the WFM to do when you are dictating schedules. Have any of you run into this or are you doing this with your contact center? What is the justification for this and how should we approach our clients with an answer to help WFM work for them instead of them working against it?  

I have so many clients that insist that they need to have a work plan for every agent out there. My reply is that by doing so, you are leaving very little for WFM to do. Sure you can keep track of adherence or compliance, but as far as forecasting and scheduling what do you expect the WFM to do when you are dictating schedules. Have any of you run into this or are you doing this with your contact center? What is the justification for this and how should we approach our clients with an answer to help WFM work for them instead of them working against it?  

Hi Robert, 

We are seeing a shift back toward per-employee Work Plan configurations to better accommodate flexible working requests. In this model, employees have the option to request specific working hours or flexibility to better manage their work–life balance.

We recognise that this can be a challenging discussion. Our hope is that features like those outlined below, which can be layered on top of a Work Plan, will enable organisations to maintain more standardised, business-flexible constraints while empowering employees to make short-term adjustments when needed.

• Agent Unavailable Times - the ability for employees to submit hard scheduling constraints for periods of the day when they are not available to work. 
  • This is most often the best fit for those organisations that are starting to move towards a Work Plan per employee configuration, as it allows for the personal "customisation" without the admin of having to manage large numbers of Work Plan configurations
• Schedule Set bids - fixed schedule set of 1-6 weeks in length that Employees can bid on, which are valid, optimised options created from an underlying Work Plan
  • provides the employee with some flexibility and preference on which resulting work patterns they work from a range of optimal schedules that meet the business requirements.
• Schedule Preferences - the ability for employees to provide soft scheduling constraints on when they would prefer to work. 
  
  Tagging my fellow Product Manager @Andrew Boland as we'd love to hear more about the challenges you are facing around this topic and the solutions that businesses are implementing. 
  
  Paul

I have so many clients that insist that they need to have a work plan for every agent out there. My reply is that by doing so, you are leaving very little for WFM to do. Sure you can keep track of adherence or compliance, but as far as forecasting and scheduling what do you expect the WFM to do when you are dictating schedules. Have any of you run into this or are you doing this with your contact center? What is the justification for this and how should we approach our clients with an answer to help WFM work for them instead of them working against it?  

Thanks, Paul, for chiming in. Would love to hear from you and Andrew about what it handicapped when you let the agents dictate schedules in WFM and how Work Plan Bidding allows for the flexibility without tying the hands of AI for scheduling.  

Hi Robert, 

We are seeing a shift back toward per-employee Work Plan configurations to better accommodate flexible working requests. In this model, employees have the option to request specific working hours or flexibility to better manage their work–life balance.

We recognise that this can be a challenging discussion. Our hope is that features like those outlined below, which can be layered on top of a Work Plan, will enable organisations to maintain more standardised, business-flexible constraints while empowering employees to make short-term adjustments when needed.

• Agent Unavailable Times - the ability for employees to submit hard scheduling constraints for periods of the day when they are not available to work. 
  • This is most often the best fit for those organisations that are starting to move towards a Work Plan per employee configuration, as it allows for the personal "customisation" without the admin of having to manage large numbers of Work Plan configurations
• Schedule Set bids - fixed schedule set of 1-6 weeks in length that Employees can bid on, which are valid, optimised options created from an underlying Work Plan
  • provides the employee with some flexibility and preference on which resulting work patterns they work from a range of optimal schedules that meet the business requirements.
• Schedule Preferences - the ability for employees to provide soft scheduling constraints on when they would prefer to work. 
  
  Tagging my fellow Product Manager @Andrew Boland as we'd love to hear more about the challenges you are facing around this topic and the solutions that businesses are implementing. 
  
  Paul

I have so many clients that insist that they need to have a work plan for every agent out there. My reply is that by doing so, you are leaving very little for WFM to do. Sure you can keep track of adherence or compliance, but as far as forecasting and scheduling what do you expect the WFM to do when you are dictating schedules. Have any of you run into this or are you doing this with your contact center? What is the justification for this and how should we approach our clients with an answer to help WFM work for them instead of them working against it?  

Thanks Robert and Dave, really appreciate you both sharing how you're seeing this play out in practice.

A lot of what you're describing is exactly the tension we're trying to address:

• If every agent has a completely bespoke work pattern, optimisation space shrinks and admin overhead increases.

• If everything is rigid and standardised, it becomes hard to support flexible working requests.

The approach we're working toward isn't about letting agents dictate schedules, but rather layering flexibility on top of a standardised Work Plan.

To touch on the examples Paul gave:

Agent Unavailable Times (now live)
Agents can add times on a day-by-day basis that they cannot work. These are treated as hard constraints, and the system will honour them, but the schedule is still built from the underlying Work Plan. Agents are warned if what they enter would prevent a viable shift being assigned.

The intention here is to reduce the need to create lots of structurally different Work Plans just to reflect personal constraints.

Agent Preferences
This is similar in concept, but softer. Agents can mark times as Strongly Prefer, Prefer, Avoid or Strongly Avoid. The system scores potential shifts accordingly and will try to assign the highest-scoring option, provided doing so doesn't negatively impact Service Level.

So preferences influence outcomes, but coverage and service targets still take priority.

The overall idea is:
Keep Work Plans more standardised and business-flexible, while giving agents structured ways to express constraints and preferences, without exploding the number of work patterns that need to be maintained.

Dave, your comment about having to create more work patterns than in previous systems because of the lack of an "unavailability equivalent" really resonated, that's exactly the type of overhead we're trying to reduce.

I'm really interested in your perspective on this:

• Does this type of layered flexibility help in practice?

• Would it reduce the need for bespoke patterns in your environments?

• Or is there something still missing that forces you back toward structural customisation?

Would genuinely value the feedback, this is an area we're actively thinking about.

Thanks

Thanks, Paul, for chiming in. Would love to hear from you and Andrew about what it handicapped when you let the agents dictate schedules in WFM and how Work Plan Bidding allows for the flexibility without tying the hands of AI for scheduling.  

Hi Robert, 

We are seeing a shift back toward per-employee Work Plan configurations to better accommodate flexible working requests. In this model, employees have the option to request specific working hours or flexibility to better manage their work–life balance.

We recognise that this can be a challenging discussion. Our hope is that features like those outlined below, which can be layered on top of a Work Plan, will enable organisations to maintain more standardised, business-flexible constraints while empowering employees to make short-term adjustments when needed.

• Agent Unavailable Times - the ability for employees to submit hard scheduling constraints for periods of the day when they are not available to work. 
  • This is most often the best fit for those organisations that are starting to move towards a Work Plan per employee configuration, as it allows for the personal "customisation" without the admin of having to manage large numbers of Work Plan configurations
• Schedule Set bids - fixed schedule set of 1-6 weeks in length that Employees can bid on, which are valid, optimised options created from an underlying Work Plan
  • provides the employee with some flexibility and preference on which resulting work patterns they work from a range of optimal schedules that meet the business requirements.
• Schedule Preferences - the ability for employees to provide soft scheduling constraints on when they would prefer to work. 
  
  Tagging my fellow Product Manager @Andrew Boland as we'd love to hear more about the challenges you are facing around this topic and the solutions that businesses are implementing. 
  
  Paul

I have so many clients that insist that they need to have a work plan for every agent out there. My reply is that by doing so, you are leaving very little for WFM to do. Sure you can keep track of adherence or compliance, but as far as forecasting and scheduling what do you expect the WFM to do when you are dictating schedules. Have any of you run into this or are you doing this with your contact center? What is the justification for this and how should we approach our clients with an answer to help WFM work for them instead of them working against it?  

I have so many clients that insist that they need to have a work plan for every agent out there. My reply is that by doing so, you are leaving very little for WFM to do. Sure you can keep track of adherence or compliance, but as far as forecasting and scheduling what do you expect the WFM to do when you are dictating schedules. Have any of you run into this or are you doing this with your contact center? What is the justification for this and how should we approach our clients with an answer to help WFM work for them instead of them working against it?